They promised each other they’d quit, but November comes and she feels warmer and more loved. She takes another drag and makes short, playful puffs, popping out sloppy rings that float across the narrow balcony of their high-rise condo. Wispy trails turn from white to gray, twirling like floating ribbons as they disappear into the ashen sky. She veers toward him, recoils, returns, retreats, then repeats, her movements a pendulum of affection and angst. She confounds him with her restless choreography. He trembles, but stays. (Where else can he go?)
/
April rolls around and beneath a mute, sunless sky she takes longer drags, cloves crackling as her bronchioles burn. She blows straight at him. Fumes choke his system, and he lets out a little cough. She doesn’t surrender her speech. They stare at each other silently. The drought and downpour come and go, one chasing after the other tirelessly. He stops coughing. He stops loving. He loses himself in the tangle of his own thoughts.
//
Silence stays until next November when he coils and uncoils his fingers around the chain of survival, flirting with his own demise. He has become her, and she has become dust. He takes another drag and sighs. He sends smog straight toward the sun, bulging brightly now that the clouds have parted. These days the coffee is never as dark and the whiskey never smokey enough to warm a body shivering in the middle of monsoon season.
///
He looks at his ring finger and flicks the rolled paper. Ash. Tobacco. Asphalt. Pavement. Potholes. Plot holes fill the novel he had spent all year writing. He won’t even finish it because he has never made a single deadline before. Might as well continue the losing streak. As ever, the manuscript will sit atop piles of yellowed paper accumulating dust under the staircase. That was his life, writing and rewriting, endlessly slithering through the maze of his own mind.
////
He wanted to write about a snake charmer, so she bought the rusty typewriter back to him after she rummaged through the antiques from the former shophouse, the one they had acquired, automated, and abandoned, before they were forced to forego any consolation for their grief and grievances. There is little time for little else. For the fundamentals. The unnecessary requisites. The exorbitant mandatory fees. (Is this how it feels? To be powerless? And voiceless? This is how it feels to be powerless and voiceless.) It doesn’t matter how loudly you scream. All they see is whether you have the brand new brains and state-approved minds.
Now, their old home with a farm on a hill is decaying faster than all their corroded appliances and cracked leather furniture. From afar, the land is littered with immaculate antiques from glorious yesteryears. Imagine that. They used to custom-order everything from Sarurakta; now, they must discard everything before the landlords from Sarurakta arrive. He tried to stand on guard while she packed up the last of her hopes and dreams, but the bronze binoculars broke as soon as he took it to the pawn shop. He can only look into the future with rose-tinted spectacles.
/////
Spectators came to the reading of his play about her life and work, which he resented her for because she made more than all their family and friends combined — all of whom wished they would go to bed already. One peculiar friend, Annie, the estranged eldest daughter of a nickel mining conglomerate family, who loved gossip and hunting hiking and pretending that she is “one of the people”, who spent Sundays at the salon getting pedicures after her short, weekend hikes and weeklong rounds of gossip, whose real name is Raden Ayu Anisa Anindyaswari but went by Annie to hide her royal ancestry, would ramble up the hill—shamelessly and flamboyantly with her rattling tin cans—carrying a telescope so she could watch them enter slumber. But alas, they never fell (asleep), which is weird because where did all his bruises come from? Annie learned to ask (no) other questions and look the other way. (What else can she do?)
And perhaps this is the delusion they’d like us to believe. That we are all one and the same. Even when one is counting coins to buy a pack of kretek, smoke curling like a prayer for survival, while another puffs away on a private island, monopolizing multiple industries and the wind itself, we are told we are all stitched from the same cloth. One of us is patching the holes of threadbare sandals while another masterminds methods to fake cybersecurity patches, secretly running an online gambling empire. Some were born holding the deed, while others born evicted. Sure, tell us the rain falls equally on every roof and hunger tastes the same on every tongue. They want us to hum in unison at the absurd chorus, pretend the melody doesn’t curdle.
////
Look, she’s stressed. That’s why she smoked so much and could never fall asleep. The only reason she kept banging around the kitchen past midnight was so that he would stop beating around the bush. Why can’t he be more like her??? Clean and tidy and unafraid to take on odd-end jobs in the outskirts! She could walk through fog in the dark of night and emerge with memories sharp and clear. He would sit under cloudless skies all afternoon and still not make it up the second rung. Is he daydreaming of Anisa(’s wealth)? She’s so tired of holding it all steady.
///
The moon ascends and she stumbles around in her nightmare to find tiny parasites chewing on his rotting papers the same way they are chewing on her lungs. He thought she was the one who ruined his study, so he sent her tumbling down the fire escape. Somehow she came out unsca—No, no no, that’s not the story. That’s the gossip he wanted us to believe. That’s the tall tale that kept getting taller each time a neighbor whispered it to another. And another. And another. But hey, they say words are what keep us going when there’s neither food nor funds left. (Spoiler: She slid down the trash chute when her secrets fell out of her shirt pocket. In other words, she tricked him into insanity and herself into guilt.)
//
Misfortunes to misery. Clutter to chaos. When the cancer came, she made the decision to leave in the swiftest way possible. It’s not like they’re left with any real resources for recovery. She popped her lungs and let them collapse together with the economy. As the Rupiah plunged, so did he. Doesn’t matter how far along he got in writing the book or the play or the eulogy. She wrote herself an eviction notice and a will to give away all the nothing she had. She made paper planes from all their crinkled photographs of the eastern savanna and flew them north towards the murky, tar-tainted horizon.
/
For the grand finale, she hissed an exhale.
Before she knew it, silvery snakes slithered out between her teeth.
Escorts to the opulent exit awaiting her (re)entry. This was the most
joy she’d had in a while, planning all this fun(eral) on her own terms.
Mourning her own future, she became the snake charmer
he had spent his career attempting to compose.
And before he could find synonyms for sorrow,
she placed a period on the final epilogue.
All conditioning out the window
down the ladder.
